


a certain peace

by orphan_account



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-25 21:38:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12044787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “We do lonely work, for all the people we meet while we do it. Let’s not be lonelier than we must.”





	a certain peace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacehopper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehopper/gifts).



The day of Anthony’s, her brother’s, death comes as it does every year. Cassandra braces for it for weeks, the sadness that sits behind her eyes more palpable each passing day, but on the morning of it she wakes up calm in the bedroom she has been given in the Divine’s palace by the Grand Cathedral. This is the one day of the year she is not dreading its approach. There is a certain peace in that. 

Cassandra does not mark the day. She busies herself, fills each hour with task after task. With her body at work her mind can’t burrow into all the little dark places she carries within. She goes from sword practice in the yard to drills outside the armory, to reorganizing her office and back to sword practice again.

She is seeing to her armor in the late afternoon, oiling each leather strap and polishing her breast plate until it shines, when Leliana finds her. 

“You are busy?” she says, her red hair bright in the light from the armory doorway.

“Only in so far as I make myself,” Cassandra replies.

“Good.” Leliana steps inside, shuts the door behind her. “I brought you something.”

Cassandra accepts the bottle handed to her with raised eyebrows. “Plum brandy?” she says. It is a fine sort, Antivan import. “Is there an occasion?”

“I know what day it is,” Leliana says quietly. 

Cassandra’s fingers tighten around the bottle neck. Then she sighs. “Of course you do.” 

“It’s easier when one isn’t sober and alone.”

Leliana is a spy. The Left Hand, for all it is coyly written around the fact in records and decrees, is a spymaster, who deals in sordid secrets and hidden truths all in the name of the Sunburst Throne. The Chantry is in much an Orlesian institution and the Divine and her Left hand both are women shaped by Orlais, and so Leliana is a spy. She spies, on everyone, agents in every corner. Cassandra understands the need for her work, much as she often disagrees with it, and she admires the woman’s skill, she respects her dedication, she trusts her unwavering faith, but it annoys her, still, being watched. Always wondering what Leliana knows that she does not say, whether any part of her life goes unscrutinized. This moment, here, is one of many, yet another little scratch on the veneer of personal privacy. 

Still. Leliana is not unkind. Cassandra has never known her to be, and she believes, fully, this is a gesture meant to comfort, not unsettle. She sometimes forget just where a line is drawn, but there is never malice behind her overstepping. This Cassandra knows as truth.

She gets up from her seat and takes two glasses out of a low cupboard. The armor master likes his drink, there are always some about. She gives Leliana a stern look of warning before she sits back down at the table, moving her armor aside to make room for the glasses. “I do not want to talk about Anthony.”

Leliana shrugs like a thrush shaking water from its wings, light and quick and without care. “Fine by me.” 

She takes a seat beside Cassandra with the natural air of belonging with which she moves through every room of the palace. Leliana, Cassandra suspects, could install herself in any estate or hovel in any nation, anywhere, and appear as though she was born and raised on the premises. For herself, she has had rooms reserved here for nearly a decade, and still cannot shake the awareness and demeanour of a guest. 

That itself is familiar. She has not lived in a place that belonged to her since she was a child.

She thanks Leliana as she fills Cassandra’s glass, takes a careful sip. The liquor is syrupy sweet and shockingly strong, a pleasant burn down her throat and an immediate warmth in her cheeks. The kind that goes to one’s head quickly. She will have to watch herself.

Leliana drinks with obvious pleasure, but with habit, as well. Not that of a drunkard, but that of someone for whom this is a recurrence. It is the specificity of the brandy, the special import, the measured movements and the particular quiet come over her. It is the words she said, _it’s easier_ , as though spoken from experience. 

With the drink aiding her tongue, Cassandra asks: “Who is it for you?”

Leliana shoots her a quick glance. “I must never forget how sharp you can be,” she says. She swirls the contents of her glass. “He was a friend. I must have told you about him.”

“Was he one of your companions as a bard?”

“Oh, yes. Did I ever tell you of the time we were tasked to exact revenge on an unfaithful marquis and our mage turned the fringes on every curtain into tiny snakes?” 

“None of those stories are true,” Cassandra says with a snort. “I refuse to believe it.”

“You’re rather unbelievable yourself, Lady Dragon Slayer Divine Savior Pentaghast.”

“Good! You shouldn’t believe any stories about me, they are vastly exaggerated. As are yours.” Cassandra drains the remaining brandy in her own glass and covers it with a hand when Leliana lifts the bottle to fill it anew. “No, thank you. I try to drink in moderation.”

“My lady is a lightweight?” Leliana says, a glint of mischief in her eye as risky as a shard of glass hidden in the grass.

“I already regret this afternoon,” Cassandra sighs. She takes another sip of brandy, wishing she had something to eat with it. A memory floods her: sweet tarts on a sunlit balcony, big hands breaking her treat into morsels, a mess of berries down the front of her dress, laughing at it. Perched on the railing with the world at her feet, a sure, steady arm around her middle keeping her from falling. “Anthony was not a drinker,” she says, before she can think better of it. 

“You were very young when he died.”

“Yes. Perhaps he was and I just didn’t know,” Cassandra says, still not sure whether speaking of him makes it all better or worse. “There is so much I do not know. Neither of Markus nor my parents.”

“I never knew much of my mother, either,” Leliana says. The way he says it, easily, with a distance too carefully measured to be truly felt cinches Cassandra’s heart.

“I am sorry,” she says, and means it.

Leliana rests her chin in her hands. The little smirk she near always carries on her face is gone, and without it she looks older. Weathered, in a way. “Do you think your brother would have liked you now? As a grown woman?” she asks, without warning.

“I think…” Cassandra bites her lip. “I hope he would appreciate me for what I do well and hold me accountable for what I do not.”

“A sensible answer.”

“Your mother would have loved you,” Cassandra says, and it is an impulse but she knows it must be true. All her memories, the ones she has left, the ones from before they all soak with blood, are memories of love, of safety. She remembers having a mother. She never wants to imagine that love fading, turning into something else. If they both still had mothers, surely they would have loved them, just as they did?

Leliana smiles. “You have a kind soul behind that eternal scowl, Cassandra.”

“I do not always scowl.”

“Oh?”

“Sometimes I frown.”

Leliana’s laughter is infectious, and Cassandra finds herself smiling, too. 

“When I drink to Tug, my friend, I always pour a glass out for him,” Leliana says. “Would you like to do that?”

“Pour one out for a friend?” Cassandra shakes her head. “Markus was my brother.”

“It’s a silly gesture, but it consoles me. We are all creatures of ritual, no?”

“It is your ritual, not mine,” Cassandra says. She adds, after some pause: “But thank you. Perhaps… Perhaps some other time.”

“Ours is lonely work, for all the people we meet while we do it. Let’s not be lonelier than we must,” Leliana says, kindly.

Cassandra runs a finger around the edge of her empty glass. “Your friend. Is today his…” she fumbles for the right words, cannot find them, “...as well?”

“Oh. No. Not at all.” Leliana winks, one of very few people Cassandra has met who can make it seem charming instead of affected. “You can figure out when for yourself.”

She’s smirking now, and Cassandra scoffs, lets the teasing comment lie. Get involved in repartee with Leliana and you never disentangle yourself, this much she has learned in their year as colleagues. She nudges her glass towards Leliana. “Will you pour me another inch?”

“Gladly,” Leliana says, grins, and fills her glass to the brim. 


End file.
